Leaves are most vulnerable to herbivory during expansion. We hypothesised that one factor favouring small leaves could be that smaller-leaved species have shorter expansion times and are therefore exposed to high levels of herbivory for a shorter period than large leaves. In order to test this hypothesis, leaf expansion time and leaf area loss were measured for 51 species from Sydney, Australia...

Betula ovalifolia is an endangered tetraploid that is restricted to two isolated sites, Betsukai and Sarabetsu, in Hokkaido, Japan. Among 50 ramets sampled along transect(s) in the each site, 45 genets in Betsukai and 49 in Sarabetsu were discriminated by simple sequence repeat (SSR) phenotypes. Multivariate patterns in seven measurements for leaf morphology and frequency distributions of fragm...

The subject of this paper, sun leaves are thicker and show higher photosynthetic rates than the shade leaves, is approached in two ways. The first seeks to answer the question: why are sun leaves thicker than shade leaves? To do this, CO2 diffusion within a leaf is examined first. Because affinity of Rubisco for CO2 is low, the carboxylation of ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate is competitively inhibit...

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology can be a valuable tool for describing and quantifying vegetation structure. However, because of their size, extraction of leaf geometries remains complicated. In this study, the intensity data produced by the Terrestrial Laser System (TLS) FARO LS880 is corrected for the distance effect and its relationship with the angle of incidence between the l...

Stem length and leaf area of current-year shoots were measured in saplings of eight broad-leaved evergreen tree species growing under a forest canopy. Stem length varied over a range of one to two orders of magnitude within each species. In all species, both the number of leaves and the mean stem length between successive leaves were greater in longer shoots. Mean leaf size and stem length were...

Weinmannia marquesana F. Br. var. angustifolia Lorence & W. L. Wagner, var. nov., a new variety with narrow, simple leaves endemic to Tahuata, Marquesas Islands (French Polynesia) is described and its affinities and conservation status are discussed. It is similar to the other two varieties of this species by having simple leaves, but this new variety has much narrower leaf blades, and it resem...

Leaves of flowering plants are produced from the shoot apical meristem at regular intervals, with the time that elapses between the formation of two successive leaf primordia defining the plastochron. We have identified two genetic axes affecting plastochron length in Arabidopsis thaliana. One involves microRNA156 (miR156), which targets a series of SQUAMOSA PROMOTER BINDING PROTEIN-LIKE (SPL) ...

Leaves of flowering plants are produced from the shoot apical meristem at regular intervals, with the time that elapses between the formation of two successive leaf primordia defining the plastochron. We have identified two genetic axes affecting plastochron length in Arabidopsis thaliana. One involves microRNA156 (miR156), which targets a series of SQUAMOSA PROMOTER BINDING PROTEIN-LIKE (SPL) ...

We propose in this paper a new method for measuring a number of leaf dimension parameters including height, width, average width, perimeter and area. A digital scanner is utilized to acquire leaf images, which unlike digital cameras, requires no calibration in terms of size and angle of the acquired images. Edge detection, filtering and thresholding algorithms are applied to identify the leaf s...